Put yourself in the shoes of the UK Ministry of Defence…

You’re responsible for keeping the UK safe from attack. You operate in an era of heightened international threats and your ICT infrastructures need to be able to adapt to emerging threats.

Attempts to breach MOD security can use a range of mechanisms and methods, and threats are becoming more difficult to detect.

Defence against them needs to be capable of countering several sources of attack at once. The MOD already had several very stringent security mechanisms; but with several different ICT systems they lacked a cohesive response to intrusions on their network.

So an additional layer of protection was required to bring all of these security mechanisms together – which is no mean feat considering the scale of the MOD’s responsibility.

The MOD wanted to integrate their existing systems and security information sources. The aim was to create a centralised security capacity that ultimately helped them to expand their situational awareness.

Detection and protection, as well as monitoring and analysis, were equally crucial.

We worked with the MOD to design and deploy a cyber-defence solution based on a range of ‘commercial-off-the-shelf’ products.

The solution enables the MOD to manage threats by delivering a holistic view of multiple ICT infrastructures. Information from all MOD security systems is now integrated, correlated, and accessible from a central control centre, so this enables users to exploit data via a common interface.

This allows the MOD to manage problems more pro-actively, which delivers benefits such as more informed decision making, reduced operational risk and learning from previous cases.

Keeping the UK safe from attack is something that most of us never really think about, but for the UK Ministry of Defence this is at the heart of what they do, and managing their own cyber-security is a key part of this.

To find out how BT can help protect your organisation click here.